Caroline Shaw was born in Greenville, North Carolina, on August 1, 1982.  The first performance of The Mountain That Loved a Bird took place at Carnegie Hall in New York City on October 14, 2017, with narrator John Lithgow, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and conductor Edwin Outwater. The Mountain that Loved a Bird is scored for narrator, flute/piccolo, oboe, clarinet in B-flat, bassoon, trumpet in C, horn in F, trombone, tuba, glockenspiel, wood blocks, bass drum, and strings.  Approximate performance time is eighteen minutes.

Caroline Shaw is a New York-based composer, performer (violin, voice), and producer of contemporary music. In 2013, Ms. Shaw became the youngest winner ever of the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her composition Partita for 8 Voices. Shaw is also the recipient of several Grammy Awards. Caroline Shaw has collaborated with a diverse range of artists, including Rosalía, Renée Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, and Kanye West. Shaw’s music has appeared in such movies and television series as Bombshell, Yellowjackets, Maid, Dark, and  Beyoncé’s Homecoming.

Shaw’s The Mountain that Loved a Bird, scored for narrator and orchestra, was commissioned by Carnegie Hall. When presented with the challenge of composing a musical work based upon a children’s book, Shaw turned to social media for suggestions. Shaw ultimately discovered, and fell in love with, Alice McLerran’s 1985 The Mountain that Loved a Bird, a book that tells the tale of a special relationship between a bird named Joy and a remote desert mountain. Shaw had several lengthy telephone conversations with McLerran and also visited the author at her Long Island home. Although McLerran was initially hesitant about the project, she ultimately embraced Shaw’s musical setting of her book.

The premiere of Caroline Shaw’s The Mountain that Loved a Bird took place at Carnegie Hall on October 14, 2017, as part of a concert featuring three musical settings of children’s tales. In addition to the Shaw world premiere, the concert presented the first New York performance of Robert Xavier Rodríguez’s The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics (2005), and Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf (1936). John Lithgow narrated and Edwin Outwater conducted the Orchestra of St. Luke’s.

The Mountain that Loved a Bird is a beautiful tale of the transformative power of nature and love. Shaw’s score contains the following dedication: “For all young, old, and future Joys & Mountains. Take good care of each other.”

program notes by Ken Meltzer